Proposal: Allow certain graveyard maps to have leaderboards.

"The graveyard is a place where beat maps abandoned by their hosts reside."
"Most of these maps were throw-aways that were not even finished maps, let alone decent in quality"

The official wiki description of a graveyard map set and peppy's 13 years old opinion don't really describe what the graveyard is now, at least, not entirely. While unfinished and amateur maps are still part of it, a lot of finished and reasonable quality maps also reside there. The scale and scope of this problem only grow every year, because the amount of finished maps that never get through the ranking system increases as much as the mapping community grows. Map community trends dictates what gets ranked and many different types of contents are left in obscurity. The idea of adding a leaderboard to unranked maps comes in handy for both players and mappers.

Indicatives of the benefits of adding a leaderboard to graveyard maps:

• Allow players to enjoy anything they like on the website, having a competitive leaderboard option, which appeals to the score/leaderboard side of the players. They're relevant and the success of the Loved Section and the entire score ranking/completionists proves that.
• Allow mappers that don't want to deal with the ranking/loved system to still see their map being played with something more tangible than that of stats on the website (which were already a big improvement compared to nothing at all).

Indicatives of the viability of adding a leaderboard to graved maps:

• Stats are already tracked on beat maps and players. When you play a graved map, score count, play count and even the score itself is already in the API traffic. The same goes for map sets that track play count and failure points.
• Storage is no longer a problem for pure stats and leaderboard display. Replay deserves a separate analysis.

Main arguments against this original proposal:

• "this will make the Loved section worthless"

While in essence they are similar, not having a replay feature further elevates both ranked and loved, also, not having a specific category and listing doesn't spotlight them as much. Keep in mind that Loved is a popularity recognition, and this idea here is not for that. Most mappers are not popular, but they still make the vast majority of the game content. This idea is to help them and players who want to enjoy content that is not reaching ranked status.

• "The automatic checking is not enough and how the manual checking would work."

• "Applying the drain time criteria will make so that good single diffs wouldn't have a leaderboard."

• "Having a leaderboard for a map that could be updated at any point and therefore wipe all scores seems pointless."

Probably the BEST argument against this idea. This means that the automation process might not be ideal in hindsight, and ideas must be discussed to fix this.

Here's my analysis and suggestions, but feel free to give your ideas;

I think the best idea here is to have a map set verifier implemented in such a way that no mapper can move from Work in Progress to Pending if the verifier still red flags a map. This could be done via coding, or via modding. With this in mind, graveyard would be split into two different categories: work-in-progress graved maps and pending graved maps. There's not much curation going on here in terms of subjective map quality, but at the very least, we can assure that pending graved maps are maps that objectively do not harm the RC as much while also being finished map sets.

The graved pending maps, after a certain period of time without updates, would then get a leaderboard. Of course, this might still allow mappers to update, but unless they find BNs that are willing to push the map, this could be seen as a perpetual 'qualified' state of the map set, where there isn't much of a reason to update any further unless it's being pushed to ranked. By doing this, we can finally separate what's literal junk that anyone can upload from legitimate map attempts. Also, it helps players to seek out more content beyond the realms of ranked/loved with at least some assurance that they're downloading a functional map, not a questionable 2 minute mp3 that has 3 objects placed.

There are two main goals in mind with this implementation. The first one is to expand the gameplay for players. Having a way to know that you're getting something playable, allows more possibilities for players to enjoy different songs that otherwise would be too obscure to find.

The second reason is to have a clear picture of one of the oldest complaints in the mapping community: ranking maps. Out of all the maps that have bare bones reached out minimum requirements without having a human curation on its quality, how disproportional they're compared to what gets ranked. By having this metric, we can see how many functional maps exist relative to how many are ranked. This can help further elevate the facts in the ongoing discussion about ranked section.